org.grouplens.lenskit.util.io

Interface Describable

All Known Implementing Classes:

BinaryRatingDAO, PrefetchingItemDAO, PrefetchingItemEventDAO, PrefetchingUserDAO, PrefetchingUserEventDAO, SimpleFileRatingDAO, TextEventDAO

public interface Describable

Objects supporting persistent descriptions of their identity. Components implementing this interface can write information about their identity to a description, suitable for hashing, etc. Unlike serialization, this is not reversible; objects are expected to write enough information to uniquely identify themselves in a persistent fashion, but not necessarily to reconstruct themselves.

Describable objects will generally be immutable. If they are not, they should write their current description.

Since:

2.1

Method Summary

Modifier and Type	Method and Description
void	describeTo(DescriptionWriter writer) Write this class's description to a sink.

Method Detail

describeTo

void describeTo(DescriptionWriter writer)

Write this class's description to a sink. Anything relevant to this object's identity should be digested; the idea is that, barring hash collisions, two objects with the same digest are equivalent. Used for things like deterministically generating cache file names.

Parameters:

writer - The description writer to use.